The Frightened Look of Love
by Lucilla Darkate
Summary: He has that sort of shy, frightened look of someone who loves far too much and knows it. [Pir8fancier] Warning: slash implied.


Draco:

They come in for lunch every Sunday afternoon. I can only think that it is what they do after one or the other of them has insisted they go to church. Sometimes she orders a salad, or wine instead of tea, but he never orders anything but a glass of chilled pumpkin juice, which he never finishes.

They always sit at the same table by the large circular bay windows. She always sits so that the light through the glass shines just so, caressing her skin and casting red sparks in her ginger hair. Time has made her beautiful, and experience has let her know it.

He always sits, leaning a little bit in, his eyes intent on her, his hands fidgeting and trying to find any excuse at all to touch her. Sometimes she smiles at him when he does this, but mostly she just looks bored.

He hangs on her every word and I have to wonder what she has to say that is so bloody fascinating. Very likely nothing at all. The weather, their children, the deplorable way her new manicure is already chipping. It doesn't matter though. He watches her with those bright green eyes of his like she is the centre of his world.

I have watched them do this every Sunday for more than a year and I have seen the desperate, tortured fear that has leaked into his eyes in the last few months. He has about him the look of a man who _knows_. He knows that where he loves, he is not loved in return. He knows that when she smiles at him now, she doesn't always mean it. Those little touches and caresses of his restless hands are his way of clinging to her the only way he can because he knows that it would be easier for her to leave him than for him to let her go.

It is a testament to his infatuation with her that after all this time he has yet to recognize me. I serve them both every time they come in, and I know that, even ten years later, I do not look much different than the pale, pointy, sneering boy I was in school. My hair is a bit longer, I'm taller, I shave, I have small wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, and I wait tables in a café, but I look enough like that boy to be almost certain that _she_ has noticed and recognized me even if he has not. And it is not always just simple recognition with her.

Today is no different from any other. She sits with her face tilted just a bit, her hair swept back in a twist with little artfully spontaneous ringlets glittering like amber and garnets in the sun. He watches her with that hopeless, helpless look that he has developed recently. That look that _says I love you. Please love me. Please let it be enough._ He laces his fingers through hers and lifts her hand to press his lips tenderly to the back of her knuckles. She gives him a half annoyed, half indulgent look and removes her hand from his and puts it in her lap.

When I take their order—salad and zinfandel for her, the usual pumpkin juice for him—he stares out the window and doesn't notice the look that she gives me. It is a look I am familiar with. I have seen it on the faces of more men and women than I care to count. It is a look that searches for and asks for a reason, any reason at all, to pretend nothing matters. To pretend that skin pressed to skin, limbs tangled together, whispered words that make promises that are broken the instant they are uttered—that all of this is possible. Even if it isn't. Even if it's just pretend and nothing more.

I give her nothing back and when I bring their order, she does not try it again.

And then I do something—something that I have wanted to do since that first day when they walked in and sat down by the window. When I hand him his juice, I let my fingers brush his and linger there until he looks at me. Not the vague, empty stare of a wretched man who sees nothing but the object of his misguided love. No, this time I know he _sees me_. He sees me and she _knows_ that he sees me and for a moment, only a second, that dead look is banished from his eyes.

For a moment, the fear of loss is gone and when he gives me that look, the one that asks for a reason, I smile just a little and give him all the reason he needs.

Just before I turn to leave them alone I catch her watching him. She is watching him and he is once again staring out the window.

Harry:

It's Sunday night and the best thing I can say about that is that I _wish_ I was drunk. But I'm not.

Ginny's friends and my friends are not the same. They're not even that much alike, so when we go out, we rarely ever go out together anymore. We used to, though. We used to go out dancing at clubs with throbbingly loud music that smelled like sweat, or to smoky little pubs where the singers were all young and ambitious, with more enthusiasm than talent, and the drinks never got any fancier than cheap merlot in a chipped glass. We used to have fun together. We used to be in love _with_ each other.

I don't go out much anymore. Not since Ron and Hermione moved away to France and we all lost touch. But Ginny… Ginny goes out almost every night and I like to tell myself that it's because she's having fun, that it's innocent, but I'm not completely stupid. In love, completely, hopelessly, pathetically in love, but not stupid.

So Ginny's out with 'friends' and I'm alone, and that might be okay—not great, but okay—if I had some whisky, which would make me _a little_ stupid. Just enough so it would be easier to lie to myself. Just enough that I could maybe believe, even for a little while, that her 'friends', the ones that keep her out all night long, the ones that I've never met, are really just friends and nothing more.

But I don't, and they're not, and it's four o'clock in the morning, and it's softly raining and I'm walking home in it.

We live in a little town house in London. We had planned to move to something larger once we had children, but Ginny decided a long time ago that she didn't want to have any children. This was about the time we stopped going out together at night and she started going out alone with 'friends'. So we never moved to a bigger house, which is fine with me because sometimes even the one we have, small as it is, feels much too large for the two of us.

He is sitting on the front steps when I get there. He stands up as I approach and flicks the butt of a half smoked cigarette into the street before turning to face me. I stop and we stare at each other quietly for what feels like a long time.

"What are you doing here, Malfoy?" I ask.

He rolls one shoulder in a lazy shrug and smiles at me, amused. At what, I cannot even hazard to guess. He'd always been odd, and time has changed him in many ways, but that isn't one of them. "A promise made," he says, and that could mean so many things, but I know what _he_ means by it.

I remember a look…a silent question asked and answered, and a touch that dared to linger only a moment too long to be meaningless.

I catch my bottom lip between my teeth and look at him while I consider what to do. I can turn him away; I know that. There is an ease about him that lets me know that it is up to me. That I can decide, and if my choice is no, he won't look at me any differently than he already does. Conversely, if I say yes, I know that it is possible that _everything_ will change.

I nod once, slowly, and his silver eyes laugh back at me. Not taunting, not mocking, as they once would have. 'Joyful', perhaps is the closest word I can think of to describe it. Not a word that I would have associated with Draco Malfoy once upon a time, but there it is. I think again how time has changed him and I wonder how much it has changed me. Age and experience have brought him joy at last. What have they given me?

"Are you going to let me in, Potter, or should we shag out here in the rain?" he says.

I shake my head and walk by him, up the steps to unlock the door. I'm smiling, and it's been such a long time since I've smiled. _Really_ smiled. It's nice to do it again. To smile and actually mean it.

Draco follows me into the house. He's quiet, so I turn to look at him, expecting to see him looking around at the walls and the furniture. Instead, he's looking at me. Watching me in a way that makes perfectly clear that furniture and wall hangings, even mine, are of absolutely no interest at all.

With his eyes intent on my face, he moves toward me and stops in front of me, so close that I can feel the heat of his body, but not quite touching. It's his way of giving me a second chance to say no, and I appreciate it, but it's not necessary.

"When will your wife be back, Potter?" he whispers, his mouth so close to mine that his breath heats my lips as he speaks.

"I…I'm not sure," I say, and swallow heavily. "Soon."

Draco's lips curve in a wicked grin. "Do you care?"

I take a deep breath and think about Ginny and her 'friends', Ginny and how she looks at me sometimes like she's almost angry at me for loving her, Ginny and the little freckle-faced children we talked about having as we lay beside each other in bed, our fingers twined together. I let my breath out and shake my head. "No," I say. "No, I don't care."

"Good." Draco presses his smiling mouth to mine briefly, then leans back before I have a chance to even taste him properly and looks around. "Which way is your bedroom?"

Ginny:

A rainy Monday morning. How dreadfully _typical_. I suppose it's pretty in a quaint, picturesque way if you want to think of it like that. And because I'm tired from staying out all night, and annoyed because I am going home to Harry and his whipped-puppy looks and sad presence, and because I'm sitting bundled in the back of a taxi with the smell of fox fur tickling my nose, a heartbeat away from drifting off to sleep, I choose to think of it as quaint and picturesque rather than dismal and wet.

I remember when I was a girl; I first fell in love with Harry Potter because of his name. Because my grandfather Weasley told me stories about the war and its heroes while I sat on his knee sucking my thumb. Then I met him, and he was a sweet boy, and pretty in an endearingly ragged way that appeals to most young girls. Especially when I could look at him and imagine him fighting monsters and dragons to save me, the 'damsel in distress', and know full well that it was not very far from the truth.

But then the monsters were all slain and the world moved on. I grew up and Harry grew up and I found out quickly that he was just a man. A nice man, a _good_ man, but beneath the legends that the world had thrust upon him and weaved around him, he was a very ordinary sort of man.

He's easy to love, and whatever nonsense he may believe to the contrary, I _do_ love him. I love him, but I fell _out_ of love with him a long time ago. It was nothing he did and nothing I did, it just happened. It's odd really, how one night you lay down to sleep, hopes and dreams flooding through your mind, so full of love that your heart feels like it could not possibly hold any more, not for anyone…and the next morning you wake up, and it's gone. You still love them, but the world has moved on and you've moved on with it. That is what happened to Harry and me.

So we move through our days and our nights, sometimes together, but mostly not. He senses my distance and clings to me tighter than ever, and I grow even more distant. I would let him go if I could think of a reason that sounds better, less cruel, than 'I'm bored'. It is cruel to _both_ of us for me to stay when I don't even try to _pretend_ anymore that I'm still in love with him.

The thing of it is, I haven't been in love with _anyone_, not for a long time. I wish I could be. For Harry's sake, I wish I could be. If I could love him, I could make him happy again, and if I could love another, I could open my hand and let him go. But the war, and everything leading up to the war, and everything that followed it, took a lot out of us all. Not the least of all, it took Harry's valiance and my heart…or my will. My heart or my will to love, either way, it comes to the same thing. It took some things and left us with others and left us to pick up the pieces and carry on.

Whatever the poets my claim, war is not beautiful, it's not courageous, it's not honourable. It's nothing but dying and watching others die because some fool takes it into his head to try to reshape the world, and you with it. It's not glorious at all. There is nothing glorious about holding the hand of a dying friend while he cries that he wants to go home and dies with blood bubbling in his last breath.

"Mrs Potter?"

I look up at the taxi driver and force a smile on my face. We've stopped in front of the house.

"We're here, Mrs Potter," the driver says.

"I can see that," I say, taking the sting out of my words with another smile. "Thank you," I tell him as I pay him and get out of the car.

He grins at me, and winks like we've shared some kind of joke rather than just a ten-mile drive through the rainy city streets. I smile at him again—the third time in as many minutes—because he expects it, and walk up the steps to my front door as he drives away.

I hang my coat in the closet by the door and go into the kitchen to make coffee. There are no house elves to do it for me, and that's fine. We had one once, but it died after bashing itself in the head too many times with the iron frying pan for various imagined transgressions. Now we have a housekeeper who comes every Thursday morning when Harry and I are out to breakfast. She cleans the kitchen and the bathrooms, picks up, dusts the furniture and knickknacks, and knows that she is not allowed to go into any of the locked rooms on the second floor or she'll be fired. We pay her enough that she is not even curious enough to have ever tried peaking through a keyhole. This is probably wise because all the keyholes are cursed.

While the coffee brews, I start up the stairs, intending to change out of my clothes into something comfortable. Our bedroom door is slightly ajar and I hear voices coming from inside, so I stop on the landing and listen.

"You like that?" a male voice murmurs.

"Yes," Harry says, gasping.

"Turn over," says the other. It's been years since I've heard that voice in any other setting than the café where Harry and I go for lunch every Sunday afternoon, but I recognize it instantly. I wish I could say that the presence of Draco Malfoy in my husband's bed is surprising, but it's not.

I'm not surprised, and I'm sure I should be hurt or jealous or _something_, but I'm not.

I turn around and silently go back down the stairs. I pour coffee into a cup with a lid and consider leaving Harry a note. In the end I don't. I take my coat and my wand and my cup of coffee and I leave.

I've been waiting for a reason and he's finally given me all the reason I need.

/finis/


End file.
